Webinars

Designing Software Platforms for Innovation and Profitability

by Dan Sturtevant & Amadeus North America

This webinar offers suggestions on how a company can make data-driven decisions to drive focused investments that continuously improve software design and agility, enabling the business to thrive in a competitive market space. The SDM-affiliated presenters—from Amadeus and Silverthread— describe how Amadeus business and technical strategy is both influenced by and drives choices in system architecture.

In today’s software delivery world, we need more predictability and fewer surprise endings. Software estimates, proposals, and plans are essential forecasts, or predictions, that represent the primary information exchanges among governance stakeholders. Trust is earned when integrity and performance are combined. Integrity is improved with more honest predictions that quantify uncertainties. Performance is improved by measurably reducing uncertainty early and continuously negotiating and steering. In this 5 minute Lightning Talk, IBM’s Chief Software Economist, Walker Royce, describes how to reason about software delivery governance with lean principles.

Technical Debt in Large Systems: Understanding the Cost of Software Complexity

by Dan Sturtevant

In this webinar, Dan says that many modern systems are so large that no one truly understands how they work. Because these systems exceed the bounds of human understanding, different design teams must work on separate chunks, glue their work together, and hope that the whole thing behaves as expected. That doesn’t always happen. In this webinar, we discuss how to measure complexity and architecture in a large codebase, and how to measure the risk and cost it imposes on the development organization. In this case study at a real commercial firm, those costs were substantial.

The Linux Fedora platform is composed of more than 2,500 interconnected software packages developed and managed by globally distributed teams and over 100,000 developers. In this webinar, Daniel Sturtevant and David Allan present research that addresses the architectural complexity of the Fedora Linux operating system. They will discuss:

How to visualize the system at multiple levels (including the view from 60,000 feet) and gain meaningful insights about its hidden structure;

How to benchmark across the system to better understand its composition and variations in complexity and quality; and

How this approach can help you building and improve software platforms.